Category Archives: Video

The Cinematic Headshot with Dylan Patrick tutorial is here!

If you are interested in learning about my shooting style and the techniques I use. Check out my tutorial over at Fstoppers! In this 6 hour tutorial I go over my entire shooting process with 3 different models. I then take you into the studio for the post production where you can follow along with 4 different RAW images, as I take you through my entire post production workflow. Check out the promo video below if you are interested! If you’d like to know more about the gear I use, along with more affordable options check out my gear page at Fstoppers. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me!

The Year 2014

So the last time I wrote anything it was October of last year, so much for keeping up with the blog. 🙂 To be fair, it has been a crazy start to the year. First was the move. My wife and I packed everything up, bought a car and headed for Los Angeles. 2 weeks in the car with 2 cats and a carload of everything, and it was still a blast. We stopped in the beautiful southwest, which was really just a tease because we were there in February, and I’m dying to go back already. It’s a stunning part of the country and I’m stoked that we live a lot closer to it. Some serious camping adventures are coming. Below are just a few of my favorites, you can catch more from the southwest here.

We are settling into LA nicely, it is certainly different here. I’m in love with the weather and getting back to having a more active outdoor lifestyle. It has its minuses, but in the end I think we’ll be happy here, or somewhere in California for quite some time, as it may not always be LA. It has definitely been a very good change of pace. Once we got moved and settled I ended up flying back to NYC to wrap up a big commercial job I did for the new Crowne Plaza Hotel by JFK. Below are just a few highlights from that property. I love shooting hotels like this. Lots of style and thought went into the interior design which makes it a lot more fun to shoot.

Soon after getting home from NYC it was time to head to Charlotte for a big shoot at the Hilton Charlotte Center City. We spent over a week shooting still and video (more on that to come next week). Shooting Charlotte was a blast and I got one of my favorite hotel exterior shots. The hotel sat in a beautiful courtyard, and there just happened to be a perfect sized parking garage across the street. It came out awesome, we shot for over an hour and in the end I used over 50 different lighting layers to create the final image. The video below is the 3+ hours of retouching crunched down to 10 min. It goes pretty quick but it can give you a birds eye view of all the lighting work it took to make the image.

Here is a before and after as well 🙂

Stay Tuned…Big Things Coming!

When I left NYC I did leave the bulk of my headshot business there as well. I always knew this would be the biggest business challenge about the move. It took several years to build it up in NYC so I imagine it will take about the same or less here, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I’m going to work at getting back to NYC a couple times a year for headshots and I’m starting to push LA headshots more too, change is always a little nerve racking, but exciting at the same time. The headshot business has always really taken off with word of mouth, so I’ll go back and do it like NYC, just shoot and shoot and shoot and eventually people will talk! In the interim I’ll be working on some personal projects finally this year that I’m excited about. I’m looking to improve my commercial portfolio in the portrait department, so I’m going to create a few projects that have been eating at me for a while now.

Here’s a few fresh headshots from LA

Some very big things are going to be coming from me in the next couple months in the headshot department, and it’s geared for other photographers so keep your eyes peeled! Part of this process has also been a re-branding and revamp of everything. A special thank you goes out to Jeremy Deming of Jerm Designs and ArtCo Lab in Coeur d’Alene, ID. He killed it on my logo and gave me a really awesome branding package. If any photographers out there are looking for a killer graphic artist check him out, he kicks serious ass 🙂

Color

For the past almost 9 years now I have been living in NYC and have never photographed the fall colors. It has always been something I have wanted to do and for whatever reason I haven’t been able to or made the time. This year I changed all that. My wife and I rented a ZipCar and headed out of the city at 5:30am to drive 2 hours north into upstate, NY. It’s absolutely stunning upstate. My good friend and super talented photographer Ron Rinaldi lives up near Woodstock and so that’s where we headed first. I also brought along the jib and slider as I’m moving into adding more video work to my scope of creativity.

I will at some point return to the east coast and start up north in Maine and spend a couple weeks driving south doing photo and video along the way, but for now the day trip was good enough, and the color did not disappoint. It was absolutely stunning, especially around the Tannersville, and Kaaterskill Falls area.

I have been flooded with a bunch of thoughts of video and photo projects I want to do before my wife and I move back west to LA in February (check out the LA Headshots page here.). I’m setting up to do a bi-coastal thing for my headshot business as I don’t want to completely abandon what I’ve managed to build in NYC, but frankly, I’m tired of winter for awhile. The short video “Color” (Below) is the first, and the next will be one of NYC itself. Vignettes, if you will, of a city that I have come to deeply love, along with the beauty of this state. This little adventure was a nice break from an exceptionally busy month with headshots, and wrapping up post production on the Marriott San Diego Gaslamp shoot. More from that to come. I’m about halfway through the retouching on the stills, and we are also putting together a few behind the scenes videos from the Marriott shoot! For now enjoy some color! 🙂